Saturday, April 16, 2016

Roe vs. Wade

I found Mr. Doggett's presentation on Roe vs. Wade and the history of abortion to be fascinating. Throughout the entire presentation I was thoroughly intrigued and engaged. With abortion being such a controversial issue in the USA today, I was curious on how our class would react to the issue. Typically conservatives are against abortion due to religious beliefs, while liberals are for abortion as they believe women have a right to do what they want to their bodies.

Before Mr. Doggett's presentation, I had heard of Roe vs. Wade, but I didn't really know the facts of the case. I knew it had to do with abortion, and that was about it. Jane Roe, who later came out to be Norma McCorvey, was arguing that she should be granted the right to have an abortion and the state should not have the right to refuse her one. Roe's attorneys built their case on previous cases such as Skinner vs. Oklahoma in which a woman who was representing Planned Parenthood argued, and won, the case that people have a right to privacy. Ultimately, the court ruled in favor of Roe, making abortion legal.

I found it ironic how as stated in the article, Roe later tried overturning that previous ruling and wanted abortion to be illegal instead. This just goes to show how controversial and uncertain this topic is. People may not be born religious, but they can convert to Catholicism later in their lives thus changing their outlook on social problems like abortion. When Mr. Doggett was talking about the amendments these people were using for their cases, I found myself knowing what they were. When I went to Harvard Model Congress this past winter, I was in the Supreme Court. This meant I too had to build my cases off of amendments in the Constitution. This made me even more interested in Mr. Doggett's seminar because I knew exactly what the amendments he was talking about were, and how the attorneys used them in the court room. I enjoyed the seminar so much and was so interested by the law behind it, I have even started thinking about going into something law related in the future! I liked how the topic was relevant today as well, and think that contributed to the overall interest of it as a whole.